GoDaddy to tap public market files for USD 100 million IPO

Domain name registration service and web hosting company, GoDaddy has filed for an IPO that could be more than USD 100 million, as per Reuters report. The raised money in its first IPO will be used for calculating registration fees and final size of the IPO might be different, as reporting by Avik Das in Bangalore.

The company was launched in 1997 by chief executive officer & founder Bob Parsons. Till date, it has acquired six companies including Media temple, Ronin, AfterNic, Locu and others. The company claims to have more than 55 million domain names, 12 million customers and offers more than 40 products.

BloomBerg says: During 2013, the company started shifting its marketing campaign to focus on how GoDaddy can help budding entrepreneurs start their own businesses, according to the filing. One commercial during the 2014 Super Bowl depicted one of GoDaddy’s customers quitting her job to open her own company.

At the end of last year, GoDaddy had 57 million domains under management, the filing shows. The company derives most of its revenue from selling the domains and Web-hosting products.

FoxBusiness says: GoDaddy has seen revenue growth, coming in at $1.1 billion last year, which is up from $911 million in 2012 and $894 million in 2011.

The business is unprofitable, however. The company lost $201 million last year and $279 million the year before.

Executive chairman and founder Bob Parsons owns a 28.1% stake, as does the GoDaddy Group. KKR (KKR) and Silver Lake each own 28%.

The lead underwriters are Morgan Stanley (MS), J.P Morgan (JPM), and Citigroup (C). Barclays, Deutsche Bank and RBC Capital Markets are also working on the transaction.

CNN Money says: The company also sees business potential in selling the hundreds of new top-level domains (like .nyc and .bike) that will soon be available with the approval of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers.

This is the second time GoDaddy has tried to go public. It went this route back in 2006, but then backed out when it didn’t get the pricing it wanted.

This time around, the company plans to offer a yet-undetermined number of shares of common stock. And there’s no word yet what the company ticker will be.

DealBook says: GoDaddy allows individuals and small businesses to set up Internet domain names, offering services like website building, hosting and security.

Investors in the GoDaddy I.P.O. will not have a meaningful say in corporate matters. The company plans to have two classes of shares — Class A and Class B — that each carry a single vote per share. But only insiders will have the Class B shares, giving them a majority of the combined voting power.

GoDaddy operates 37,000 servers across 9 global data centers located in Arizona, California, Illinois, Virginia, the Netherlands and Singapore. The company owns one data center in Arizona and leases the rest.

GoDaddy’s peering architecture includes 15 sites around the world.

In 2013, GoDaddy “handled an average of over 11 billion domain name system, or DNS, queries per day and hosted approximately 8.5 million websites.”

GoDaddy uses infrastructure-as-a-service and platform-as-a-service technologies internally in order to improve the management of its data centers and the ease at which it can deploy new products.

GoDaddy uses a number of open source technologies, including OpenStack, Cassandra and Hadoop. The latter helps the company deliver business dashboards to its customers.